Playing at the Next Level by Ken Horowitz

Author:Ken Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

VectorMan

BlueSky was well known for its ability to tackle any number of genres, and while several action platformers were developed by the company, the one most Genesis fans associate it with is VectorMan. A highly regarded but short-lived series that never successfully found a way off of Sega’s 16-bit machine, VectorMan pushed the Genesis hardware in multiple ways, many of which had never before been attempted.

Work began on VectorMan shortly after BlueSky completed the action/RPG TechnoClash for Electronic Arts. A subsequent project was canceled, leaving Programmer Richard Karpp, Artist Mark Lorenzen, and Designer Jason Weesner with some free time. They came up with the concept for the game after brainstorming for a few days away from the BlueSky offices. As fans of the simple, side-scrolling action classics of the time, they took their inspiration for the gameplay from hits like Treasure’s Gunstar Heroes, and they looked to titles like Virgin’s Aladdin for the art style and gameplay. It was decided early on that the story would follow the gameplay, as most people don’t play games like Contra for their stunning narrative. VectorMan’s plot unveiled a dystopian future in which robots cleaned a contaminated Earth, with little more detail beyond that. Karpp and the others wanted a game that was fast and had multiple weapons, and the story was designed to follow this style of play (Stuart, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis 300).

BlueSky had originally planned for all characters in the game to be made of spheres. Karpp and a few others were fans of a technique where single characters are formed by connecting individual sprites. Karpp’s group thought it would be interesting to use the technique for all the characters in a game. To create VectorMan’s distinctive look, BlueSky utilized vector-piece technology (developed on the Amiga by Programmer Karl Robillard) that was planned for another title in progress, the X-Men sequel Clone Wars. The technology was supposed to have been used in a Danger Room portion (Weesner). BlueSky lost the bid for Clone Wars to HeadGames, and Karl Robillard’s vector technology was then moved over to the group’s new project, VectorMan (Karpp; Novak). BlueSky had created some demos that plotted the vertices of polygons by using spheres, a design choice based more on hardware limitations than anything else. The vector pieces allowed for incredibly fluid animation that BlueSky was able to run at 60 frames-per-second (Karpp).

Robillard experimented with using sphere sprites at various scales to achieve a 3D effect. The result was promising in tests but did not function well when implemented. Robillard then created what he called the “VectorMan Animation Tool” to use arbitrary sprites to create characters. The pieces composing the characters were small bitmaps that remained constant but had their coordinates moved via Robillard’s program. By setting priority on the bitmaps on a Z axis and moving them around on the X and Y axis, full animation could be achieved. Using this method, a full frame rate could be achieved, and memory usage was kept to a minimum, since only key frames of animation had to be stored.

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